37.3469, Confs: Intercultural Communication in Medicine and Healthcare: Issues and Perspectives (Italy)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3469. Thu 22 Oct 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3469, Confs: Intercultural Communication in Medicine and Healthcare: Issues and Perspectives (Italy)

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Date: 20-Oct-2026
From: Jerome Tessuto [girolamo.tessuto at unicampania.it]
Subject: Intercultural Communication in Medicine and Healthcare: Issues and Perspectives


Intercultural Communication in Medicine and Healthcare: Issues and
Perspectives

Date: 27-May-2027 - 29-May-2027
Location: Naples - Italy, Italy
Contact: CIRLaM
Contact Email: cirlam at unicampania.it
Meeting URL: https://www.cirlamvanvitelli.it/

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Clinical Linguistics;
Discipline of Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Translation

Submission Deadline: 31-Jan-2027

Conference Convenor
Jerome Tessuto
CIRLaM Director
In contemporary society, intercultural communication is central to
social dialogue and interaction among individuals from diverse
cultural and linguistic backgrounds and is both a facet of
globalization and a response to it by increased transnational
migration, tourism, international education, digital connectivity, and
lingua franca English. Intercultural communication is often used
interchangeably with multi-, cross-, and transculturality in
discussions that describe contact situations between individuals from
different cultures and languages (Kramsch 2010; Jackson 2014;
Rings/Rasinger 2023), and continues to shape a range of approaches,
paradigmatic positionings, and interdisciplinary integrations both
inside and outside academia. The dynamic and reciprocal relationship
between language and culture enabled by the globalizing processes of
intercultural communication serves as an active rather than a static
space where language is a driver for socio-cultural norms, values,
beliefs, and identities of a community that are continuously
negotiated and constructed in fluid, context-dependent interactions
(Fishman 2004; Kramsch 2010; Baker 2015) and contributes to how
individuals develop “intercultural competence” (Lustig/Koester 2010;
Byram 2021) to engage with culturally diverse interaction partners in
today’s globalized and multicultural environment. At the same time,
the mutual relationship between language, culture and intercultural
communication also exposes discourse systems, or sites of identities
and ideologies shaped by power dynamics in interactional encounters
(Peng/Dervin 2022; Tian/Dervin 2023), paralleling the role of
“discourse identity” and “social identity” (Scollon/Scollon 1995;
Scollon 1996; Scollon et al. 2012) expected of linguistically and
culturally diverse individuals and groups in their social interaction,
including those who might differ in terms of age, nationality,
ethnicity, class, profession, or gender, from the local to the
national and global scales of intercultural communication (Baker
2022).
Given the ubiquity of cultural and linguistic contact across global
society, the dialogical and interactional process of intercultural
communication gains relevance in medical and healthcare contexts. It
plays a major role in fostering the exchange of health information,
values, and expectations between culturally and linguistically diverse
healthcare providers, patients and other stakeholders and adapting
communicative practices in an increasingly diverse healthcare
environment. An understanding of this form of communication requires
acknowledging the variety of healthcare settings where cultural
differences, language-discordant contexts, and distinct beliefs about
illness and treatment primarily shape doctor-patient, doctor-parent or
therapist-client interactions in high- and low-context communication
styles. While distinct knowledge and identity-forming practices are
magnified by an ‘expert vs. layperson’ gap in doctor-other
intercultural encounters, crossing cultural boundaries also amplifies
the impact of asymmetrical power dynamics on medical outcomes, with
healthcare providers frequently defaulting to authoritarian
communication styles through implicit bias and dismissing the
patient’s experiential knowledge of their illness in favour of
biomedical, clinical knowledge and expertise. Regardless of whether
these interactional dynamics work virtually or in person in a specific
healthcare scenario, the rapid development of healthcare
service-oriented digital communication platforms for effective
interaction offers opportunities for healthcare providers to address
day-to-day language barriers and cultural expectations for diverse
patient populations (Tessuto 2025), and combines with interactional
contexts where evolutionary benchmarks of AI-mediated interpersonal
and intercultural communication are indexed and reasoned over human
agency, cultural plurality, and mutual understanding (Tessuto 2026;
Tessuto/Federici/Di Domenico 2026).
Wherever intercultural communication is to foster more equitable,
culturally responsive actions, it is not an optional add-on, but an
essential clinical and healthcare context. Here, linguistic diversity,
differences in cultural perceptions of health and illness, divergent
core cultural values, asymmetries/discrepancies in provider-patient
relationship and communicative style (paternalistic vs.
participatory), inadequate health literacies, and implicit bias and
prejudice based on race, gender, or other factors directly affect
diagnostic accuracy, medical adherence, patient satisfaction, health
disparities, and provider burnout, and hinge on building trust and
rapport, reducing errors, and ensuring safe, equitable care. The
ability to communicate across cultural divides, acknowledging and
embracing varying customs, beliefs, and languages for commonality,
mutuality, but also tensions, turns upon several discursive and
communicative processes and practices that shape the agency of
individuals and other key players in professional, institutional or
organizational contexts of medicine and health care and brings
together a variety of multimodal texts and genres through which
meaningful dialogues and interactions are reinforced and negotiated in
intercultural communication.
This conference broadens the scope of the 2025 symposium on AI in
medical communication and embraces the relevance of intercultural
communication research in medicine and health care informed by the
professional or institutional- and organizational-level practices of
discourse, identities, relationships, and power that are configured
across linguistic, cultural, and technological boundaries. The
conference brings together academics and practitioners from the area
of (applied) linguistics, medicine, and other fields to discuss the
theories that have shaped the field of intercultural communication
within the global academic community, how such theories contribute to
an understanding of individual-level and societal level phenomena of
cultural/linguistic connections and interactions, and how they impact
different texts, genres, media and modes of discourse and
communication across the biomedical and health continuum.
Topics for research include, but are not limited to, the following:
 - Identities, roles, and ideologies in professional, institutional,
and organizational contexts of power asymmetries in intercultural
health communication, including contested knowledge/expertise claims,
and resource allocation in healthcare industries
 - Identities, roles, and ideologies in interprofessional healthcare
teamwork and communication
 - Intercultural mismatches in health literacy and health care
services
 - Ageism, nationality, racism, gender, and prejudice/bias/stereotype
in intercultural health communication
 - Translation, interpreting & intercultural mediation in healthcare,
including language and linguistic framing barriers
 - Culture, ethics, and law in AI models of intercultural health
communication
 - Intercultural communication competence in the healthcare context
and medical education
 - Digital tools, popular media and intercultural communication
We therefore invite individual/joint paper and panel proposals that
explore these broad areas using a range of scholarly frameworks for
theoretical, practical, and methodological debate, including but not
limited to the following approaches:
 - discourse (textual) and (critical) genre analysis
 - critical discourse analysis
 - conversation analysis
 - corpus-based discourse analysis
 - multimodal discourse analysis
 - mediated discourse analysis
 - ethnography and intercultural communication
 - interactional sociolinguistics/sociolinguistics of globalization
 - translation/interpreting studies
 - diachronic and synchronic perspectives


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